


topography on the map of you

by ships_to_sail



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Boys In Love, Extended Metaphors, Kissing, M/M, Patrick Brewer is Gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21710053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ships_to_sail/pseuds/ships_to_sail
Summary: He said they could talk any time, but they found that their lips had far better uses.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 26
Kudos: 117





	topography on the map of you

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, one more again, I suppose.
> 
> You are all so damn delightful, I'm considering building a summer home here <3

_ “But I’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes so many times now, I’ve memorized it. Topography on the map of you, a world I’m still charting. I know it. I added it to the key, here. Inches to miles, I can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude, recite your coordinates like  _ la rosaría.  _ This thing, your mouth, it’s place.”  _ \- Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

_ i _

Night. Crickets and cicadas and an entire choir of creatures hiding just past the edge of the woods around the motel. Cold air and sweaty palms and glances cut side-eye, passed back and forth like the bouncing of a tennis ball. The shift of cotton twill against vinyl seating and the expanse of palm across the side of his neck. He closes his eyes and feels them both lean in, moving until they’re not anymore and they’re poised over the center console like a duo on the highwire. He smiles as he feels the metal press into the heat of the flesh below his hand, and the voices in his head shush to a single murmur - he did it, they both did, and here they were, still doing it. 

He said they could talk any time, but they found that their lips had far better uses.

_ ii _

Mid-morning light sharpens the corners and shadows and potential for doubts, but his face nearly cracks in two the minute he’s through the doorway and he’s moving quickly straight into the other man’s arms. Aftershave, and the light blue poly blend that crisps beneath the pads of his fingers and smells like clean cotton and Patrick. Lips brushed dryly across the cheek with a small enough spark that he threatens to set them both on fire. Palms press firmly into the muscles of his back and he wants to go limp against them, wants to feel the softness in his bones that he keeps wrapped around his limbs. But the store is open, and will be for the next several hours, and the boxes that have already been moved, opened, and partially unpacked won’t be faced out on their own. 

_ iii-ivx _

It’s noon, then dawn, then past midnight, on the borderline between too late and too early, and suddenly it’s silly to be keeping discrete track of all the times their bodies find one another. The times fingers trace their way across shoulder blades - David’s broad, Patrick’s slimmer but sturdy - or up forearms, lightly along the back of the hand as though following the line of vessels until they disappear completely. They’re reminded how good it feels to touch, how many nerve endings live in the fingers, on the small stretch of skin behind the ear, in the hollow of the elbow just below a cuffed, navy sleeve. Lips pressed to temples, or foreheads, or other lips that quickly melt into a tangle of tongues, the pressing drive of need they’re both having trouble finding a way to fill. The line in the sand gets drawn when the angry red ring just below Patrick’s collar doesn’t specifically  _ stay  _ below his collar. 

_ xv _

The box has been locked back up, and the whiskey has been consumed, and the road left in front of them is wide open. So his arms wrap firmly around the top of his shoulders, forming an almost cave for them as he comes up on his knees, making his height even higher as they press their bodies together and feel the weight of the world pull them down into the bed. 

_ xvi _

He knew Patrick could sing. Like, Patrick had told him as much when he explained that he’d used to host the open mic night. But then he’s there, across the room, singing with his voice and his body and his eyes and every part of him feels like it’s going to come apart at the seams. The gentle press of his mother’s palm into his arm reminds him to breathe and he can feel the tears in his eyes he is determined to ignore because then how will he see this miracle of a thing happening. Something in him is opening and even though they don’t get to kiss that night it doesn’t matter because he’s sung a song and unlocked a part of David he didn’t know to find a key for and there’s a feeling in David’s body like he’s never had before and he thinks it might be trust and it might be love and it might just be too many drink tickets at the event last night but he’s willing to take a deeper look at it. 

_ xvii _

No no no no no no no he’d made this happen and then he’d blown it up and he wanted to press rewind, to never have cornered Moira at the city hall, to never have sent David the cookie, to never have sang his song or fled his life to run to Schitt’s Creek, to have never proposed to Rachel, to never have broken up and gotten back with her a dozen times in as many years, to never have walked across the dusty wooden floor of family’s local church to a shy girl with flaming red hair, to never have been the second child of Clint and Marcy, to never have started his life on the path that would bring him here to the point where David Rose is looking at him and refusing to cry and telling him that he’s damaged goods

_ xviii _

He’s determined not to kiss him, and so for the entirety of the song he manages not to. He ducks his body in and out of the other man’s space, looming over him as he sits, reaching out to put fingertips on his shoulders, shimmying and swaying and moving around the store and hoping to disappear into the attention. He’d called it an olive branch and only need a bottle and a half of prosecco on his lunch break to fully commit to it, but it was literally the least Patrick deserved. And when he’d thrown his hands up at the instrumental break of the song, folding his arms behind his head so that his biceps stretched the worn fabric of the button down in a way that David might have called lewd, he’d kept his strength high and managed to finish his performance, lips kept firmly to himself. 

Until, of course, Patrick bites his lip shyly and then smiles at him with the million-watt setting that he’s never been able to say no to. So he’s reaching out and running his thumb along Patrick’s bottom lip and asking a question with his eyes that Patrick is leaning in and answering with his body and it’s like they’ve both come home.

_ xix-xxx _

It feels different on the second round, now that they’ve had to find their way back to each other. They mark their days in casual touches still, but when they pull apart the space between them fills with a sense of solidity, sparks that have shifted to flames, burn steady but somehow hotter than before. Their time falls into the comfort of pattern, of days at the store and nights alternating between Ray’s and empty rooms at the hotel, or the back seat of Patrick’s car, occasionally Stevie’s place when David is desperate enough to beg. David can’t forget the way Patrick’s voice shifted when he’d told David to stay and think about what he’d done, Patrick still feels the way David’s eyes had raked down his body when they’d first met. They’ve known each other long enough to have an entire catalog of physical memory, and it brings both of them a sharp, almost foreign sense of joy. 

_ xxxi _

There’s a bag in his hand but then it’s hitting the floor and Patrick has just long enough to crack-wise and make clear note of the lack of to-go cup and then their bodies are pressed together, a space that had existed complete annihilated as arms wrap around his shoulders and the kiss between them grows longer, and deeper, and more in a way David is about to put specific word to. When they separate, his eyes are rimmed in red and there is a break in his voice and Patrick wants to kiss him again to swallow the sound, but he needs to hear it, needs to hear it with every cell in his body and then David’s mouth is moving in a whole new way, saying words he’s never said before - except twice to his parents and once at a Mariah Carey concert - and Patrick can feel the joy in his heart balloon so suddenly the air is pushed out of his lungs and he feels like he might actually, legitimately burst. So instead he beams at David and makes a crack about the tea and knows, by the way David hisses “fuck” and pushes him away with the tips of his fingers, that he’s going to marry the shit out of this man. 

_ xxxii _

There are no better kisses than Christmas kisses, except for half-Christmas, half-Chanukkah kisses with a boyfriend who doesn’t know he’s got an espresso machine waiting for him under the small tree in your apartment.

_ xxxiii _

They’re 25 feet in the air holy shit why are they 25 feet in the air just ten more steps Alexis can die in a fire like a dirty set of makeup clogged falsies he was ready to strangle her with his bare hands he should have KNOWN she was full of an overwhelming amount of bullshit eight more steps he can HEAR THEM TALKING YOU KNOW and oh my god why does Alexis NEVER remember Anderson Cooper she set them up four more steps jesus h christ he needs to talk, to tell Patrick all the things he loves, apologize for this studid as shit decision and oh my god two more steps and he’s basically jumping the distance and oh my god Patrick is there and catching him and they’re kissing and Patrick is scolding him but it’s a sexy scold and it’s still working and then Ted talks and David remembers that, really, he wants to set his feet on solid ground. And then kill his sister.

_ xxxiv-xl _

It didn’t escape his notice that David was able to move in with him but instead they christen the apartment in at least four different places before the housewarming party that David tells him is going to go poorly. But then he’s watching Ted - handsome, nice, drunk out of his mind Ted - press a sloppy kiss to David’s face and he’s seeing read and they’re not counting kisses anymore but if they were that would be one that didn’t get to go to him and yeah maybe the whole party wasn’t the best idea. But then David won’t let it go until Patrick admits he’s jealous and everyone is out of their apartment. So Patrick learns about the asymmetrical haircut and the pacifiers and David finds out that, really, his boyfriend loves him and is in love with him enough to be a little jealous and David hasn’t ever had that before, so.

_ xli-l _

Now that they’ve got the space, the pressure building on them finally has a place to go, and it feels like this is a different piece of the puzzle of them that’s falling into place at last. They can begin to make a life together at Patrick’s place, toothbrushes on the sink and an overwhelming number of Korean skin care products in the medicine cabinet and the kind of creamer Patrick likes that David makes a point of driving all the way to Elmdale to get him from the organic market. And in every corner, the memory of new kisses, casual kisses, lips pressed to foreheads over coffee, to the back of a hand while they sit together, reading or drawing or just spending time alone together. Deeper kisses as they slide in to bed at night, fitting parts of their bodies together in new ways, discovering new geographies and ways of taking each other apart. 

_ li _

He just slid into home and he wants to throw everyone the double bird because no one really thought he could do it but, honestly, he didn’t really think he could do it either but then he did and now everyone is jumping up and down around him and the entire world has distilled itself down to the way the light cuts across the outfield and a double-press of his boyfriend’s lips against his temple. David knows that when he kisses twice, Patrick is saying I love you in a language only David can hear. 

_ lii _

It’s not scientifically possible to pull emotions from another human being but that doesn’t stop Patrick from feeling fortified as David says he loves him and kisses him one last time and then he’s turning to face his parent’s and sitting across from them and his world is teetering, again, on the edge between The Before and The After. And he knows it will be okay but he so desperately wants it to be more than okay that when his mom says she wants him to be happy and his dad laughs with him over David’s sweaters, a new level of love opens up in Patrick and at the very base of it is a man named David Rose, who has brought him to this place and taught him to be the person he’d neglected seeing his entire life. So later, when everyone has gone home, he stretches along the length of his body and presses a hot, slow, teeth-laced kiss to David’s neck and feels the vibration of his assent. He fits here, in this place between David’s face and his chest, two different stops on the geography of David that Patrick has decided to carve at out claim just for himself.

It’s only later that David tells him he’s never had anyone else kiss him there, either.

_ liii-lxx _

As it turns out, there is no way to number the appropriate number of kisses when you carry your boyfriend - your fiance - up a mountain and are rewarded with wine and cheese and a foundational shift in the fabric of your universe

_ lxxi-infitium  _

The stage lights are out and Moira is in the closet and none of the announcements they’ve wanted have gone the way they planned. But. David is standing on a chair above him, and he watches the light glint off the bands of gold wrapped around his fingers. And he can see it, there in front of everyone they know and cherish, the path of love they’ve mapped for themselves around this town. There isn’t a corner of Schitt’s Creek that hasn’t seen their affection, and Patrick smiles his hundred-million-watt smile as he downs the leftover champagne and knows.

They’ve got an entire universe of blank maps in front of them, waiting to be charted.


End file.
